Recently I needed to build a multipurpose file server to host CIFS and NFS shares — CIFS for the Windows users, and NFS for VMWare to store ISOs. It needed to utilize back end storage (NetApp via iSCSI), provide Windows ACLs for the CIFS shares, and be able to authenticate against two different Active Directory …

How to Configure Server Core with Active Directory Services, DNS, and DHCP Using Nothing But PowerShell

Windows Server 2012 offers two installation options: Server Core or “Server with a GUI”. This begs the question: Why would you want to install Server Core instead of the GUI? One reason may be that you have limited …

When it comes to security, IT leaders focus so much on preventive action that they don’t plan for contingent action. What would you do if you were hacked and confidential information was stolen? If you can’t confidently answer that right off the top of your head, you’re one breach away from looking for a new job. …

Virtually every business I have ever worked with had one “hero” in its IT organization — that one person who was considered almost indispensable because he had the “keys to the kingdom” and knew things others didn’t. I believe many IT leaders allow such a scenario to persist in their organization because they’re either …

A common question facing service providers that use XenApp to provide published applications to multiple clients is whether to use a single, large farm for all clients, or to dedicate a separate farm to each client.

Often the degree to which infrastructure is shared among clients is a matter of philosophy and …

If you’re familiar with networking you know that when a device is directly connected to two separate IP networks, traffic destined for one of those networks should egress on the interface that is directly connected to that network. For example, if your storage appliance is directly connected to the 172.16.1.0/24 …

It came to my attention today that there is a seemingly new issue with XenServer that is causing the time in Windows VMs to become offset by one day. My first thought was that this could be related to 2012 being a leap year, so I pulled up the source code for the Xen 4.1 hypervisor that handles leap years from …

A lot of users who upgraded to the recently released Adobe Reader X 10.1.2 are finding that it crashes when trying to print a PDF.

If you have two Netapp filers and want to use Snapmirror to replicate volumes or qtrees between the two, but want to force the replication traffic to traverse a specific network, there is a quick and easy way to do it.

You’ll need a few things to get started:

– SSH access to both filers

– Network configuration on and …

1. Disable unused Group Policy sections

In each of the GPOs that are applied to your servers and users, both User and Computer processing is enabled by default. Disabling unused parts of a GPO can shave some time off both logons and server booting. You can do this in the GPO properties. Just bring up the GPO in Group …